A
white point (often referred to as
reference white or
target white in technical documents) is a set of
tristimulus values or
chromaticity coordinates that serve to define the color "white" in image capture, encoding, or reproduction. Depending on the application, different definitions of white are needed to give acceptable results. For example, photographs taken indoors may be lit by
incandescent lights, which are relatively orange compared to
daylight. Defining "white" as daylight will give unacceptable results when attempting to color-correct a photograph taken with incandescent lighting.